


A Girls' TARDIS Adventure

by Aris Merquoni (ArisTGD)



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Alternate Universe, Episode Tag
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-10-28
Updated: 2007-10-28
Packaged: 2017-10-07 01:03:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,745
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/59685
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArisTGD/pseuds/Aris%20Merquoni
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An AU from the end of Season 3 of New Who. The Doctor and the Master and Jack Harkness seem to be getting along fairly well, but Martha is left to her own devices. But there's more in the back of the TARDIS than just a few empty rooms!</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Girls' TARDIS Adventure

The Master, Martha noticed, looked much less threatening when he was pouting.

"I thought you'd stop me _sooner_," he said. "Honestly, I thought, 'And now the Doctor will show up with a clever scheme and stop me' all the time I was gaining power. I didn't know you'd actually let me get _away_ with as much as I did."

The Doctor crossed his arms and looked peevish. Jack crossed his arms and looked mistrustful and seriously cool. Both of them stayed between the Master and the TARDIS console.

"Oh, come on," the Master said after a pause, "You know I just did it to get your attention."

"You're the other last Time Lord," the Doctor said. "You don't need to get my attention."

"Oh, yes I do," the Master said, pouting harder. "It gets you going lickety-split. 'Oh, goodness, got to stop the Master again before he enslaves a planet or causes the universe to crumble apart or otherwise touches my stuff.'" The Master reached behind him and tapped out a quick rat-ta-tat-tat on the TARDIS railing.

"Don't do that," the Doctor said.

"You don't like me touching your stuff?"

"There will be no stuff-touching. Stop that."

"You're no fun." The Master turned to look off into the glare of the roundels. "The other last Time Lord and you've lost your sense of fun. Remember Axos? That was fun. Or Logopolis? Sure, I tried to hold the universe hostage, but we had a laugh."

"You threw me off an aerial!"

"And you got more attractive!"

That set the Doctor back a bit. Jack rubbed his chin and said, "I have to say, this last regeneration did help a bit with that."

"What's wrong with the way I looked before?" the Doctor said peevishly.

"Nothing!" Jack held up his hands. "I... just like those ears better on you, that's all."

The Doctor reached up and tugged one of his ears thoughtfully. "Hmm, I suppose that's all right, then."

"Wonderful!" the Master said, seemingly oblivious that the Doctor hadn't been talking to him. "Oh, it's just like old times. I wish the Rani was here, that'd just make it better."

"Why would you want her here? She didn't like either of us," the Doctor said, scowling again.

"Well, she liked me. Well, no she didn't. All right." The Master shrugged. "I was just thinking, it's kind of hard to perpetuate the species with just two men."

Martha raised her eyebrows.

The Doctor looked up through his glasses, at that one angle that meant _I am considering what you are saying even though I am moody and upset._

Jack tilted his head back slightly and frowned, surprised and thoughtful all at once.

The Master shrugged slightly, looked back at the Doctor and said, "You know, just under the circumstances."

The Doctor clicked his tongue a few times, looked sideways in no one's direction, and then looked up and said, "You know, Jack was pregnant once."

The Master grinned. Jack half-laughed and said, "Hey, now, just the once, I'd rather not do it again any time soon unless--"

The Doctor grabbed Jack by the belt and swung him around, and the Master stepped forward in a perfectly synchronized motion to hug his arse, and all of a sudden in front of Martha was a Time Lord sandwich with Jack Harkness filling, and all three of them were very adept at shedding clothing.

"Oh," she said.

After a moment, when it became clear they weren't going to stop on her account, she hesitantly cleared her throat and said, "Please, don't stop on my account."

After a few more minutes she decided that if they weren't going to notice her standing there, they certainly wouldn't notice if she slipped her hand down the front of her jeans.

And after a few more minutes when they'd commandeered one of the TARDIS benches and were all three of them demonstrating some particularly gymnastic skills, she decided that her last decision was a good one and that sitting down so her knees wouldn't give out suddenly would be an even better one.

Two hours later she got up to get a sandwich.

They eventually moved to one of the bedrooms when the deck plating got too hard on the Doctor's knees, then to another bedroom when every surface in the first one was, Martha assumed, too sticky to lie on. After the third day her hand started to reflexively cramp up every time she passed that corridor and she decided she needed a new hobby.

"Oi," she said, stepping over half of a broken chair, three towels, and a badly bent vibrator to directly address the Doctor. "Jack pregnant yet?"

The Doctor waved vaguely from his upside-down sprawl against the bureau at Jack and the Master, who were engaged in enthusiastically balancing on top of the other half of the broken chair. "Ah, no, not yet. We've got another few things we want to try." He swallowed and licked his lips as the chair-half gave a threatening creak. "And then better start the list over again, just to be safe."

"Right." She crossed her arms, looking peevish and uncool. "Where's the library?"

"Uh..." the Doctor's eyes unfocused for a moment. "Top of the stairs, four corridors down, seventh door on the right, bottom of the landing, three rights and a short walk through the gallery."

Martha counted off the directions in her head again, nodded, and left the blokes behind.

Four corridors, seven doors, a landing, and three rights later, there was no gallery, and Martha was beginning to think that the Doctor didn't know the inside of his own ship.

She sat down on an upturned packing crate and contemplated the choices before her. She could go back and try to find that gallery, she could go all the way back and bother the Doctor again, or she could head on, into corridors which smelled slightly musty from disuse. The lights here were slightly dimmer than the rest of the ship, and she figured the Doctor hadn't been down here in some time.

She looked back at the stairway, thought about the Doctor, the Master, and Jack doing things to one another, and decided to see what was ahead.

There was a tube of lipstick in her pocket, one remaining vanity that hadn't made its way out of her trusty leather jacket. It served well enough to make a big arrow on the floor pointing the way back. Then she strode off down the corridor, humming to herself.

The corridor came to a junction.

The junction led to a pantry half-filled with jars of noodles. All shapes, all sizes, some as thick as her wrist and some as fine as her hair.

The pantry opened into a courtyard that had been last used to hold a birthday party, if the decorations strewn around were any clue.

It was fun, actually; wandering around where the Doctor hadn't been or at least hadn't tidied up in years. There were things to look at, cabinets to poke her nose into, and occasionally helpful signs in completely alien symbols to try and decipher. Martha was having a brilliant time until she looked down at a junction and found one of her lipstick arrows pointing into a room she'd never been in before.

"No way," she said.

The lipstick matched hers exactly when she double-checked. The handwriting was the same, the arrow signed with her distinctive curlicue on the end. And she definitely hadn't been in the room with the blue floor and the piles of mobile phones lying about. She'd have remembered.

"I didn't screw up my system, did I?" she asked aloud, sitting back on her heels. "I was sure I only drew these pointing back the way I came."

The lights in the corridor briefly dimmed.

Martha stood, quickly; couldn't see anyone approaching, not from any angle. "Hello?" she called.

No answer, but a prickling feeling growing on the back of her neck.

She'd never felt unsafe in the TARDIS before, with the one exception of when they'd run inside to find the Master's paradox machine hooked up to her innards. But she was starting to feel distinctly unwelcome in this place, and she didn't know which way to turn to get out. Gingerly, she stepped forward into the blue room, looking around to see if possibly, somehow it was familiar and she just needed to see it from the right angle. Nothing in the haphazard piles of furniture and small electronic devices triggered her memory, nothing looked anything like she'd seen before--

From right in front of her something she'd thought was a pile of clothes or a shadow of a cabinet lurched and grew and _loomed_, reaching out a hand full of gigantic curved _talons_ to swipe at her face. Martha shrieked and ducked, barely in time, feeling the rush of air over her head as she stumbled backwards, slipping on a small rectangular object and nearly falling. She pulled herself upright, gave herself maybe half a microsecond to look at the giant, shambling beast before she followed the Doctor's best advice and ran.

Out the door, right down the corridor, through a small gallery--paintings and photographs on the walls--hearing its panting breath behind her, down another corridor, green walls she didn't recognize, a quick series of turns and down a short stairwell. She dived into the first room she found, which was full of pillows and sheets, no furniture, and threw herself down and buried herself underneath a pile of laundry.

She watched the door for five full minutes while her heartbeat thrummed wildly in her ears. Nothing stirred.

Taking a deep breath of detergent scent, Martha let herself believe that she'd outrun it. Of course, now she was even deeper in the TARDIS, and lost, and there was the really discomforting fact that something like that was _in_ the TARDIS in the first place.

She wanted a way out; she wanted to know what that thing was. Neither goal would be served by hiding under sheets. She pushed herself to her feet and headed back into the corridor, checking carefully for monsters as she tiptoed quietly down the hall.

At the end of the hallway across from the stairs was a doorway into a huge room, bigger than the control room, stretching out the size of a large gymnasium. It looked like a jungle; vines had actually grown into the walls and over structures in the middle, which looked like... well, like an abandoned water park, really. There was a huge slide running from the top of one wall around the other three and dead-ending half a meter from the floor. Martha grinned despite herself, did a quick look-around for monsters, and didn't see any. Then she stepped forward to check out the slide.

Her feet were snatched out from under her, and with a sickening lurch she was suddenly bobbing, airborne, flailing madly with her arms and dangling from a vine attached to one of the slide's support railings.

"Ack!" she cried, then clapped her hands over her mouth to keep from making more noise. Oh, God. What if this was the monster's trap? What if it was way smarter than she'd thought it was and... and...

"Oh my God, are you okay?"

Martha blinked and tried to turn toward the sound of the voice--a woman, with some kind of accent, maybe American. There was a shudder and she was being lowered down toward the floor, slowly enough that she could brace herself with her arms and fall softly onto her back instead of hitting her head.

By the time Martha sat up, the woman was climbing down another vine toward her. She was trim, but muscular; she was wearing the remains of a pair of blue jeans, trimmed to make shorts, and a halter top that might have once been blue or green but was now mostly brown. Her hair was in a long braid that came down past her waist, and when she turned to help Martha up from the ground she displayed the most incredible pair of breasts that Martha, in her admittedly only cursory survey, had ever seen.

"I'm so sorry," the woman babbled, "I had this set up for the monster, it's been so long since I've seen another--I mean, you are a human, right? From Earth? God, I'm so sorry, I didn't mean to--"

"I'm all right," Martha said. She shook her head a bit, gave the woman another appraising look. "I--yes, I am, human from Earth, I mean. I'm Martha. Doctor Martha Jones. Who are you?"

The woman's face lit up in absolute relief. "Oh, thank God," she said. Then she grinned and stuck out her hand. "It's more than great to meet you, Martha. I'm Perpugilliam Brown. But all my friends call me Peri."

Peri's explanation came out in a jumble of phrases, like she wasn't used to talking to people. As Martha followed her, picking her way through the bits of broken pipe and rubble covering the floor, she learned that Peri had traveled with the Doctor some time ago, something had happened, and she'd gotten lost in the back of the TARDIS. Martha figured if the Doctor had been anything like he was now, that wasn't actually too surprising.

Peri had a made herself a rather cozy camp at the base of the water slide, where she explained there used to be a pool.

"It was jettisoned," she said, sharing a package of alien protein bars. "I nearly got caught in it, actually."

"So you've been down here all this time?" Martha asked.

Peri nodded. "Ten years. It was 1984 when I left Earth."

Martha swallowed funny and coughed for a while. "It's... 2007," she admitted when she could talk again.

Peri's face fell. "No. No way."

"Sorry."

"But..." Peri scrambled among her pile of possessions, finally pulled out a day planner. "I took notes. I checked off every day. All my days only have ten checks on them. It _can't_ have been more than twenty years!"

Martha shook her head. "We're in a time machine. And besides, time's... funny, in the Vortex, and in the TARDIS. I don't think it has to pass the same way everywhere."

Peri clutched the day planner to herself for a second, then sighed and set it down again. "And... the Doctor? Is he still out there?"

"He's still fighting the good fight," Martha said. She thought about exactly how she'd left him, thought about amending her statement, and decided not to.

Peri nodded, smiled a bit, and turned back to her protein bar. Martha watched her expression and finally said, "How could he not have come led you out of here?"

"I don't think he knows I'm here. The TARDIS is huge. I've been trying to find my way out for ten years, but the monster won't let me down most of the corridors."

Martha shuddered, her predicament coming back to her in unfortunate clarity. "What is it?"

"I don't know. But it's blocked all the ways out I can see. I've tried to trap it, but I can't set up anything out in the corridors and it never comes in here." She eyed Martha speculatively. "But now there are two of us..."

Martha smiled. "We might be able to lure it out."

"Trap it."

"Figure out what it is."

"And why it's keeping us here."

Martha grinned. Peri grinned back and stuck out her fist. "Rock-paper-scissors for who gets to be bait."

When they'd finished constructing their trap, Martha insisted on making some extra lassos, and then double-checking the knots, until Peri rolled her eyes and asked if she wanted to stay there, and Martha swallowed hard and forced herself to walk back up the hallway.

"C'mon, monster," she said as she crept forward. "Here's a nice juicy human to munch on..."

The arrow was still on the floor where she'd last seen it, pointing into the same room. Martha took a deep breath and poked her head around the doorway.

Nothing moved. Dim lighting, piles of small plastic boxes. Martha slid one foot forward, then the next, paused and looked around. Nothing.

There was another arrow on the floor pointing at a door on the other side of the room.

"Monster?" She called.

She stepped inside, ready to bolt at the first sign of a looming shadow. Nothing loomed. She moved further into the room, throwing glances at all the dark corners. Nothing. Swallowing hard, she bent down, scooped up a small flip-phone, and tossed it at the place the monster had sprang from before, and it clattered harmlessly against the wall.

"Well," she said, eying the arrow on the floor, "No hope for it now."

The door opened into a hallway which dead-ended to the left, and led onward to the right. Nothing was in the dead-end, so she turned and looked around the corner.

Something was wrong with the hallway, something she couldn't quite put her finger on, like when the Doctor had been wearing the perception filter. Martha blinked and turned away, and out of the corner the beast suddenly appeared.

She shrieked, she couldn't help it, it had appeared so unexpectedly, but she turned as fast as she could and ran, hard, down the corridor. She could hear its growls behind her, its feet pounding on the floor, its panting breath. Through the room, past the gallery, through the turns and down the stairs, into the water park and--"Peri! It's behind me!"

She jumped past the trap and spun around to see, but there was nothing there.

Peri tightened her grip on the vine trigger for the trap. Martha panted, watching the doorway.

"It... vanished," Peri finally said, looking at Martha, confused. "I heard it following you, but it just... disappeared."

"That's impossible," Martha said. She took a few more gasping breaths, then tried to breathe deeply, to calm down. Her head felt light. "I mean, it's more impossible than the other impossible things around here."

"Maybe it can't come in here," Peri said. "Maybe the TARDIS is protecting this room somehow."

"But how would it just disappear?" Martha walked over to the door and poked her head into the corridor. The monster had gone as though it hadn't existed.

Hadn't existed...

"Peri," she said hesitantly, "I don't think there really is a monster."

"What do you mean? You've seen it. I've seen it. You were just chased by it."

"I know, but... you were just saying, about the TARDIS protecting this room?" She looked around the outside corridor again. "I don't think it's protecting us from the monster. I think it's protecting something else."

Peri came to stand by her, frowning. "You think the _TARDIS_ made the monster?"

"Yeah. Look, I was heading to where I found it before, and there was this corridor, and something was... wrong with it. Like the end I was at and the other end didn't connect up right. And as I was trying to figure it out, the monster just appeared. Out of nowhere." Martha waved at the empty corridor. "And now it's disappeared into nowhere. I think it's some kind of illusion, or projection or something."

Peri looked down the corridor, then back at Martha. "You really think so?"

"I really do! I think there's something wrong with that part of the TARDIS, and it's trying to keep us out."

"Well..." Peri took a step into the corridor. "What's wrong with it, then?"

"I don't know." She took a deep breath. "But we aren't going to be able to get back to the front of the TARDIS unless we find out."

"Can't we go around it?"

Martha shrugged. "I don't know. You're the one who's been exploring down here. Is there another way out? If there is we could get the Doctor down here to deal with it."

Peri thought for a few moments, then shook her head. "No. Every exit I've tried I've run into that monster." She sighed. "Okay, so what are we going to do?"

Martha took a breath and squared her shoulders. "I'm going to face it again," she said. "And hope I'm right."

Peri insisted on coming with this time, clutching a length of pipe as a weapon. She inspected the arrow on the floor with interest.

"Okay, I'm going in first," Peri said, holding up a hand when Martha was about to argue. "Seriously, I've got the weapon. You run if I get eaten."

"But--" Martha didn't have time to protest as Peri stepped inside.

Gulping, she ran up to the doorway to see. Peri walked forward, brandishing the pipe. "All right, come on," she said. "I know there's something wrong here, and I'm not going to run away."

After a pause, the shadows in the room seemed to flow together at the far door, coalescing into the beast. Peri raised the pipe and scowled at it as it formed. It was huge and dark and shaggy, its forelimbs were clawed and dangerous, and when it opened its fang-filled mouth it roared like an engine.

Peri didn't move. "I've seen scarier things than you," she sneered. "I've fought Daleks."

The monster pulled back, and Martha noticed how... strangely indistinct it looked. Blurry. Like its details had never been filled in. It roared again, but quieter.

"That's right," Peri said. She stepped forward and poked with the pipe, and the monster backed away. "We're not going to be fooled by tricks."

The monster groaned one final time, then collapsed into shadows and vanished.

Peri stood there grinning. "We did it!" Martha crowed, running to meet her. "You did it, anyway, that was amazing!"

"Yeah, wow, I didn't really believe that would work." Peri poked at the empty floor where the monster had been standing with the pipe. "So what's the thing it was keeping us away from?"

They stood staring at the corridor for a while, trying to figure out what was wrong with it and making their eyes hurt.

"It's like..." Martha said, "Like it's bent, somehow. Or like this end doesn't connect with that end properly."

"Like there's something there in the middle. Or not there. Something." Peri rubbed at her eyes. "Ow."

"D'you think it's dangerous?"

Peri shrugged. "If it wasn't, why would the TARDIS be trying so hard to keep us away from it? Either it'll hurt us or it'll hurt it."

"I think it's broken."

"The corridor?"

"The TARDIS." The more she thought about it, the more she was sure of it. "I mean, what with all it's gone through in the last few years--the Time War, the Master building a paradox machine in it--"

Peri blinked at her. "I don't know about that, but even when I was helping the Doctor it was never working altogether right."

"Right! So maybe this bit is just... broken."

They stared at the wrongness for a few more seconds.

"I wish we had some sort of... I dunno, manual for this thing," Martha finally said. "That might give us a clue."

Peri gave her a look. "Actually, I have the TARDIS manual in my stuff."

Martha opened her mouth, closed it. "Well, let's have a look, then."

The manual turned out to be a silver book the size of something to put on a coffee table on the outside. When Martha opened it up to flip through it, it was about seven thousand pages long. Peri shrugged when she gave her a look. "It's bigger on the inside than the outside."

"Great," Martha said, carrying it back toward the cellphone graveyard. "I suppose the answer has to be in here somewhere, then. Hey, what's this?" She tugged on an extra-stiff page at the back. It folded out into a large plastic sheet, and when she ran her hands over it text appeared in tiny glowing letters.

"Hunh," Peri said. "I've never seen that before."

Martha held the book up to peer at the page, and the writing reformed into a diagram with arrows and labels. She blinked and stepped forward, and the diagrams shifted.

"Wow."

Peri looked over her shoulder. "That's interesting."

Martha walked up to a wall and lay the page against it. The diagram resolved into a schematic, a line drawing of electronic parts.

"I think it's a diagnostic," Martha said. One section of the diagram turned red and started blinking. "Look here. It says something about a... time hole?"

"What's a time hole?" Peri said.

"Dunno," Martha admitted. She pulled the manual down from the wall and flipped to the back. "Is it in the index? This better have an index. A book this important needs an index."

The index was halfway through the book and printed in green ink for some reason, but it did exist. Peri spotted 'Hole, Time' on the page first; Martha flipped to the correct section and squinted at the unfamiliar terminology. "Time Hole. Orthogonal junction in exterior tesseract void transfer--this is going to take ages to decipher."

"Um..." Peri lay down next to the book and propped her chin on her elbows. "Exterior tesseract--like the outside of the TARDIS?"

"A junction in the outside of the TARDIS?"

"A _hole_."

Martha scowled. "So a place where the outside--that's the vortex outside. That can't be good for us."

"Or for the TARDIS." Peri squinted at the manual again. "What's that bit about severity and size?"

"There's a--" Martha tugged on the page, and it flipped open to reveal a chart and--"Oh, God. There's a slide rule. I don't know how to use a slide rule."

"I do." Martha stared at Peri, who shrugged. "What? I didn't get a calculator of my own until pretty late in high school."

Martha blinked a couple times, then caught on. "Right. 1980s."

Peri grinned and bent over the math.

Martha went back to the description. "Oh, hang on," she said when she'd deciphered another few paragraphs. "This says that time travelers build up some sort of... field or something of vortex energy, which can be used to repair a time hole."

"Repair how?" Peri said.

"Uhh..." Martha frowned. "Contact with the junction. I think that means by touch."

"I think I've figured out how big the time hole is, by the way," Peri said. She looked up at Martha, brow furrowed. "Touch? You mean one of us has to jump into a hole in time?"

Martha swallowed. "Uh. That's one way of... yeah."

"How much of this field do we need to--oh, wait, that must be what this chart is for. Hang on." She bent over the slide rule again. "Wow, this is really something. So we pick up this vortex energy just by hanging out in the TARDIS?"

"Yeah, apparently," Martha said. "Kinda like static electricity."

"So jumping into a time hole is like zapping yourself on a doorknob."

"Basically."

"Hunh." Peri frowned at her. "Say, how much do you weigh?"

Martha couldn't help feeling a little shocked. "Why do you need to know?"

"This vortex energy stuff builds to an equilibrium, but it's based on mass, not how much time you spend traveling."

Blushing, Martha told her. Peri slid the slide rule over, then said, "Wow. Between you and me, we _just_ have enough vortex energy to do it."

Martha stared. "Really?"

"Yeah." Peri nodded, then frowned worriedly. "I mean, if my calculations are right."

Martha looked down at the slide rule doubtfully.

Peri sat up, looking indignant. "Hey, I may look like a bimbo, but I can use a slide rule."

"It's not that," Martha said quickly. "I just wish we had a calculator, or several. Or better yet that we had the Doctor here."

"Yeah," Peri said wistfully.

"What happens if we just stay here?"

"Well," Peri said, "There's food and water and stuff. And there are more places to explore. We just can't leave. And I don't want to know what'll happen if the Doctor has to jettison more parts of the TARDIS."

"That happen a lot?"

Peri shuddered. "It used to."

Martha stared glumly at the manual. "A time hole's a hole in the wall of the TARDIS. If we don't fix it, jumping in's going to throw us out of the ship."

"Yeah."

They looked at each other for a moment.

"It's your call," Peri finally said. "I mean, you know the situation out there better than I do. D'you think the Doctor'll come looking for us soon?"

The image of the Doctor, the Master, and Jack sprawled on a bed and coated with lube floated to the front of Martha's mind. She closed her eyes and shook her head. "He's... preoccupied."

"Well?"

Martha took a deep breath. "How likely is it that this'll work?"

Peri shrugged. "No idea."

"And if we don't succeed?"

"Dumped into the vortex."

Martha stood up, hefted the TARDIS manual thoughtfully, and then held out her arm. "C'mon. Let's us girls do the sacrificial hero thing for a change."

Peri grinned and linked her arm through Martha's. They turned the corner and stared into the twisting, knotted wrongness in the middle of the corridor.

Peri whooped, Martha screamed, and they ran forward. The corridor floor seemed to twist out from under them, and then they were clutching each other and falling, screaming, watching the world go millions of fighting colors.

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAOof!" Martha finally said when she landed, hard, on a pile of fabric, Peri making a similar landing next to her.

She stared, dizzily, up at the ceiling, until she recognized it.

"Peri," she said, "I think it worked."

"Uuuuh?" Peri said. Then she scrambled to her feet. "Hey! We're in the wardrobe room!"

Martha sat up slowly and scratched her head. "That sounds familiar. Shouldn't there have been a lamp post?"

Peri giggled, then started flipping through the clothing. "Wow, this brings back memories. Hey!" She pulled out a coat--well, it was a coat-shaped object, but made of so many contrasting patterns and colors that Martha's eyes started to water. "I'd have thought he'd have burned this when he regenerated next."

"Yeah, he's wearing pinstripes nowadays," Martha said, not bothering to add _When he's wearing anything._

"So what was he up to when you left?"

Martha grimaced. "Well, he and the Master--"

"The Master? He's here?" Peri stared at her in shock. Martha stared back in similar shock.

"You know him?"

Peri grimaced. "Yeah, a bit. He's creepy. He tried to kill me once."

"Yeah, same here." Martha sighed. "Well, he and the Doctor are the last of the Time Lords, so--"

"What happened to Gallifrey and the rest of them?"

"Time war. Against the Daleks. They both got wiped out." Martha waited for Peri to nod. "So they're... um. Getting along. With Jack."

"Who's Jack?"

Martha stood up, got her balance. "Oh, he's... nice. C'mon. Oh, wait--" she paused near the door and grabbed a couple pairs of trousers. At Peri's raised eyebrow, she shrugged. "Just in case."

"'Getting along'," Peri said as they headed down the hallway.

"Um... yeah."

Peri was quiet for a bit. "Has the Master regenerated?"

"Oh, yeah, just in the time I knew him, so definitely since you saw him."

"Hmm." Peri was quiet for a bit more. "And is this Jack guy--"

"Okay, fellas," Jack's voice echoed down the hallway. They turned a corner just in time to see a door open and Jack Harkness back into the hall, hands raised. "That's enough for now. I'm just going to go lie--" he turned and caught sight of Peri. Several seconds later, his gaze reached her eyes and he grinned. "Hi there. Captain Jack Harkness, at your service."

Peri was fighting to keep her own eyes at eye level, Martha noticed. "Hi," she said, smiling shakily. "I'm Perpugilliam Brown, but please, call me--"

"PERI?" the Doctor exclaimed. There were some crashing noises, and a second later he appeared at the door, hair askew, clutching a towel around his waist.

"Hey, Doctor," Martha said. "We fixed a time hole."

The Doctor was still staring at Peri. "I thought you'd gotten married to Yrcanos back on Thoros Beta," he said.

Peri frowned. "Why would you think that?"

"Oh, well, there was a problem with the Matrix."

"Yeah, it had two sequels," Martha interjected.

The Doctor finally glanced at her. "Martha! Good to see you again--you were gone quite a while." He grinned. "Find the library?"

"No, actually," she said, "I was chased by a monster and found Peri and a time hole. She had this, by the way." She held up the TARDIS manual, shifting the extra pairs of trousers to the crook of her arm.

"Oh, hey, I haven't seen that in ages," the Doctor said.

"What's all this, then?" the Master said, poking his head out.

Martha stared at him. "You regenerated again."

The Master scratched at his hair, which was in this incarnation short, curly, and blond, and came with the most nonthreatening goatee Martha had ever seen. "Yeah..."

"Funny story about that, actually," the Doctor said. "Turns out, when a Time Lord's respiratory bypass system fails--"

"Oh, please," Jack said, wincing and lowering one of his hands into a protective pose. "I thought we'd agreed not to talk about that."

Peri looked from one of the guys to the other in quick succession, then turned to Martha. "I see why you wound up wandering in the TARDIS."

"They are a bit, aren't they?"

"Just a bit." Peri brushed at her shirtfront, looked back up to grin at Martha. "I think I need a shower. Can you show me where they've moved to?"

Martha felt a sudden flush come over her, and silently thanked whatever beings were watching over her that it was hard to tell when she was blushing. "Sure."

"Hey, uh," Jack said, "I could use a shower."

"Yeeeah," the Doctor agreed. "I think we could all, um..."

Peri studied Martha's expression for just a second before rolling her eyes in the guys' direction. "Please," she said. "C'mon, Martha. You can leave the pants."

Martha watched Peri saunter down the hallway for a full five seconds before she finally worked out what the American was saying. "Sounds good to me," she said anyway, grinning, and left the boys, their extra changes of clothes, and the TARDIS manual behind to run down the hall.


End file.
